Industries in extremely technical fields, like space flight and satellites, are highly regulated by the US government. While Google could try going with another country's space agency, I'd be willing to wager that it is against several national security laws and tantamount to treason, even as a foreign subsidiary.

I'm still recovering from dining @ Carlos O'Kellys the other night and seeing the species in question polishing off a couple dinners and appetizers. " Damn , honey , look at that! His tits are twice as big as yours!" I had to draught two more Dos Equis Dark , just to finish some of my dinner.

Not specially. It depends on the satellite altitude. For low orbits, a 1-m telescope is vastly sufficient for 25-cm resolutions.Maybe you are confused with Geostationary orbits, where indeed enormous mirrors would be required to get hi-res (GEO stays interesting because of its permanence : only from tyere you can get a "movie"; from low orbits it's images "on the fly")

If it's anywhere above the atmosphere, which, being a satellite, it is, then the limit is at about five times that due to atmospheric diffraction. You need multiple times the limit in order to process the results into something near your diffraction limit. That's why WorldView-2 had an aperture about 2m to get 50cm resolution. Plus it was launched sun-sync at ~700 km, which I suspect is where WV-3 will sit too.

I have complete confidence that companies will follow all laws even for things that are to be placed forever out of the reach of inspectors. Even if they could, they would never just put an artificial restriction on the equipment for when some clueless government inspector wants to do the pre-launch check.

You know what Slashdot's editors want us to be terrified of the privacy implications from? Something significantly lower-resolution than existing aerial photos like this image [knoxcountymaine.gov].

Download the image, and measure the length of runway 3/21 in pixels from threshold to threshold. (Approx. 6341 pixels.) Figure out how long it should be at 25cm per pixel. (4876 pixels.) Scale the image appropriately (7500 pixels wide.) Zoom in to 1:1 resolution onscreen.

Now, are you terrified? No? Nor am I. Want to confirm I'm right about the scaling? Find a car and measure the length: it should be about 20 pixels, or 500cm for a typical full-sized US car. (I tried one, and the first one I tried was exactly 20 pixels.)

So no, I'm not scared. What I am is mildly amused that the myth of satellites that can read newspapers from space still exists. That, and surprised that imagery this (still relatively) low-resolution was ever off limits in the Internet age. And a bit disgusted that a supposed nerd site insults the intelligence of nerds who know far better, this readily.

Only if you're looking up in the direction of the satellite, otherwise it's your head that would be about 1 pixel. Of course it's unlikely in either case that your your head/face would be contained in one pixel so it would more probably be split among 2 or 4 pixels.

Sure they can. First, they have to convince me to go outside. Then, they have to convince me to look up. I understand that their satellite may not be directly overhead and can get an angled view, but still - they will get pictures of the top of a lot of people's heads. I guess there will be a brisk market in tinfoil hats with a middle finger being shown on the top.

The average human head is 14.5cm x 23cm x 20cm, so you are quite correct that it would mean that the average human head would occupy less than 1 pixel

I'd argue a little differently, that pixel is primarily made up of your face/head (>50%). It's probably good enough to tell your skin or hair color, depending on angle.

It is important to note that if a person was observed laying down on the ground, they would occupy *up to* 10 pixels in the case of the world's tallest person, but the average would only require 6.

He'd be up to 10 pixels long. Actually 11 pixels, if you don't restrict yourself to tallest living person. But I'm guessing he's more than 10 inches wide, so I expect around twice the area except maybe the top pixel for the head. And more if you stretch out your arms, say two more to each side. So more like 1 (head) + 2*5 (body, legs) + 2*

the average human head would occupy less than 1 pixel regardless of which axis it was observed across.

No, that would be low resolution. This is high resolution. Use a shot where the face is at the intersection of 4 pixels. There, I just quadrupled your resolution!

Of course, the headline (which seemingly has nothing to do with the articles or even the summary) says see your face from space, not identify your face from space. If your face is represented in 1-4 pixels, which could potentially be distinguished as a face by those pixels' colors in comparison to neighboring pixels, isn't it technically seeing

...well, they can already see your Blurred face (or dog, incredibly enough) from any street anywhere. But from outer space, at least I'd have several layers of atmosphere, clouds and whatnot to protect my pretty limbs from prying eyes in the sky.

Have you seen the weather data you can download freely? It's available from a satellite near you (or an internet site, if you don't have a clue like most people...yes they don't have a clue). The resolution, (high res MAP) is terrible. Why? Ever heard of atmosphe

A lot of what shows up on Google Maps, especially in larger metro areas, has been photographed from planes. They're only up on nice VFR days, so there's no atmosphere in the way. Better resolution satellite stuff from Digital Globe will be nice to see, but aircraft will continue to dominate the commercial aerial imagery sector for quite awhile.

Especially now a UAV capable of carrying some quite high quality camera hardware is actually pretty cheap. I've been admiring the 8 rotor which can take a decent SLR on a gimbal. It's not exactly cheap by 'home user' standards, but it's a comparable price to the camera it's carrying. Compare to the price of a satellite and launch though... there's really no contest.

They have (or had) a mostly exclusive contract with GeoEye for one of their satellites, though the US government held priority over that in case they needed access to the imagery.

Google recently purchased SkyBox, and so may soon be launching its own constellation of smaller satellites. These will reportedly have high-res video capabilities, so it may be possible to watch traffic (or other things) moving in real- or near-real time.

Commissioning ariel photography is very expensive, is only done occasionally rather than continuously, and Putin would take a very dim view of you flying your plane over his army that he says isn't even there.

If the government is removing the restrictions that tends to indicate they already have access to even better satellite imagery capabilities. When that plane disappeared a few months back they probably had enough evidence to locate the crash but could not publish the information without revealing their true capabilities.

What kind of honest lives? We probably can't rule out the possibility that they can, in the future, tape your sex act at home from all the way in space. So in that case we should stop having kids then? That would get rid of most of the human race pretty quick

What kind of honest lives? We probably can't rule out the possibility that they can, in the future, tape your sex act at home from all the way in space. So in that case we should stop having kids then? That would get rid of most of the human race pretty quick

Thinking sex between consenting people is dishonest, shameful and/or immoral has led to many of the draconian laws on the books today.

Privacy will be a thing of the past in no time. The only matter is when do we reach the point of no return.

Start living honest lives...

Yeah, but isn't it pretty creepy that it could be relatively soon when your nosy neighbor (and by that I mean anyone that knows your address) will be able to stalk you from their basement? In 75 years we have gone from the first satellite images to them being commercially available and nearly real time (at least daily). In another 75 years, it seems plausible that there will be near real time video of most of the populated world. It's going to happen for military purposes, so we might as well accept it

aerial imagery will never be a problem as these are static snapshots. They don't show anything private and the current rate of 1fpa (frames per annum) depending on region they don't yield enough data for anything unless you have really bad luck doing something really dumb and one datapoint is enough.

The resolution in time is so much worse than everything else that is collected about you that people who want to invade your privacy use other sources and then point a satellite to the location they want to watc

When you've got data from smartphones, the satellite imagery is largely irrelevant. You've already got a solid identification, location fix, and for bonus points - local audio and video. A photo of your hat won't make much difference.

Just wondering. If the resolution limit is imposed by a restriction, then what would a satellite be able to do if the only limitation was technological?

I remember seeing a documentary about leaked details of satellites that could read the headlines off a newspaper in the early 1970s, but they would have had very low orbits and didn't stay up long, mainly because they would run out of film.

From low orbit, about 25cm is reported for military satellites. Maybe a little better. DigitalGlobe is now at 41cm. Reading newspaper headlines from orbit is unlikely. If the military satellites were doing that well, there would be little reason to fly recon drones or aircraft.

Once you can recognize vehicles, weapons, and troops from orbit, more resolution doesn't help much militarily. The next step, which is where DigitalGlobe is going, is more frequent imagery, and wider fields of view and more down

I think the best that can be done with a single image is around 15cm due to the atmosphere. Maybe somewhat better with multiple images, although I don't know how well that works on a moving target/ moving platform except at astronomical distances.

I once heard that during the Iran crisis back in the late 70's the imagery was good enough that they could identify the Ayatollahs by the shape of their beards

AFAIK this limit was for _selling_ photos commercially, not for taking them. Those satellites could already take photos at higher resolution (25cm or better), they just had to be provided to USA government and noone else.50cm images sold commercially were probably upsampled from 25cm photos anyway.

Limit was also only applicable in USA (obviously), and was changed to allow USA companies to compete with rest of the world as technologies advance.

I seriously do not understand what they mean by 50cm (or 25cm) resolution. On the current Google Maps picture of our house, you can clearly see the yellow garden hose snaking across the lawn. The garden hose is maybe 3cm thick. We have stepping stones in the lawn, averaging maybe 40cm by 60cm; each stone clearly occupies multiple pixels. I would guess that a single pixel represents about 10cm.

This is in Switzerland. Are photos in the USA fuzzier? I just zoomed in on a military base, and I can clearly see th

So you're telling me that if I want to protect my privacy now, I either have to stop looking straight up while I'm walking around? How the hell am I supposed to see where I'm not going?!? And what am I supposed to do if I accidentally make eye contact with someone???

Wouldn't you have to be looking straight up for a satellite to see your face? I don't know about you, but I hardly ever look straight up into space except at night to look at the stars, and at night I think it would be hard for a satellite to see me.

Ok, nitpicking here, but whatever.
If you go from 50 cm to 25 cm resolution, yes, that's double the resolution. But an image exists 2 dimensions, so it's double in the x direction and double in the y direction for a total improvement of 4 times. What used to be one pixel is now four.

I would rather that google had a legitimate *real time* display on it's google earth so that I'm not looking at some piece of land that was photographed in 2009.. THe resolution on Google Earth is appaling, and streets is better, but beinmg six years out of date makes it useless fior my needs. I once was trying to send someone a screenshot of my address to help them find it.. being in the country it can be difficult.. but I'd onl;y been living there 5 years and still that was too recvent, as all google stre